The Minister of Health, Mr. Tomaz Gantar today signed a contract to award a consortium of companies led by Marand the project to provide Slovenia's national eHealth infrastructure.

The solution will enable the exchange of clinical information between all healthcare stakeholders across the country, thus improving care as well as patient safety. Once completed, it will serve as the interoperability backbone providing services to eHealth applications such as eReferral, ePrescription as well as national health registries. It is based on established industry standards including IHE ( http://www.ihe.net) and openEHR ( http://www.openEHR.org) and is compatible with European cross-border initiatives such as epSOS ( http://www.epsos.eu).

»Slovenia was one of the first countries to introduce health insurance chip cards and our healthcare professionals are avid users of IT solutions. The missing piece was infrastructure to connect local systems allowing exchange of information to facilitate care coordination. Together with our partners, we believe we can deliver a state of the art solution in record time to help move our country to the forefront of European eHealth« said Tomaz Gornik, Marand cofounder and VP.

The project, valued at 6,35 million Euros, is partly financed with EU funding and is to be completed in five months.